An ideal tool for engaging students in a flipped or blended learning classroom.

No Time to Stand Still!

It has been a whirlwind from October until now and our product has changed significantly since its initial launch at the beginning of the school year.

In October we released the TAPit Free app for iPad, used in conjunction with TheAnswerPad.com website for teachers. The TAPit Free app was, at that time, an electronic bubble sheet for scoring paper tests – mainly a summative assessment tool, with online reporting, item analysis, etc.

In February 2013 we added the formative assessment component, and things really started to take off. The ability to engage the students, push response types, and have them draw their answer was really great. Of course, this was only great if you had an iPad. So in April 2013, we added the browser version for BYOD. Now, we were able to reach a much larger audience. This larger audience has been extremely helpful in guiding our direction.

In May 2013, we released the Template Gallery, which provides a large number of backgrounds that can be pushed to the students to annotate. So now it is June – there has to be something new, right?

June will see the the Template Gallery pushed one step further. Teachers will be able to upload their own graphics to push out to the students. Not only that, they will also be able to pre-mark up the image and then send it out. This opens up a whole new dimension to Go Interactive. TAPit Free app also just got an update. It now supports 5 responses on a MC question type for answer sheets. We have also added an advanced drawing palette for iPad, which includes line and shape tools and a text box tool.

All this for free? Well, no. You can use many of these features for free, but we are a freemium model too. To use ALL of these cool features, upload all the images you like, and create all the answer sheets you like for a class of 36 students and an individual teacher – it will cost you $46 per year. Formative assessment “on- the – fly”, to engage students and give them an opportunity to show what they know, and summative assessment to capture the data when needed. To use an analogy I recently heard: It’s the practice and the performance in one tool. We hope you’ll give it a try.